The Occult History of the U.S. Military’s PSYOPS and its Highly Symbolic Recruitment Video
The goal of PSYOP is, essentially, to mess with people’s minds. Appropriately enough, a recent recruitment video by the 4th PSYOP Group accomplished just that. Posted on the official social media accounts associated with the U.S. Military, the video titled Ghosts in the Machine gained some viral traction as viewers were impressed with the video’s production quality … while being baffled by its overarching message and symbolism.
We believe in ghosts…
Do you??
— 1st Special Forces Command (@1st_SF_Command) May 3, 2022
What does it all mean? To better understand this video, let’s look at the fascinating yet secretive world of PSYOPS.
PSYOPS
PSYOPS stands for “psychological operations”. It can be defined as:
“Planned psychological activities using methods of communications and other means directed to approved audiences in order to influence perceptions, attitudes, and behavior, affecting the achievement of political and military objectives”.
When books describe PSYOPS, they often refer to WWI-era strategies such as dropping leaflets from a plane to demoralize the enemy. That era is long gone. PSYOPS moved way beyond these primitive methods to adopt highly sophisticated techniques utilizing the latest technologies and the immense power of mass media.
But that is not all. There was always a “magical”, supernatural element to PSYOPS.
In my 2011 article “Top 10 Most Sinister PSYOP mission patches“, I highlighted the omnipresent “magical” element found in several PSYOP mission patches.
These allusions to magic are not merely figurative. PSYOPS extensively researched occult and supernatural phenomenons such as ESP (extra-sensory perception) and remote viewing.
This symbiotic relationship between PSYOPS and the occult is fully personified by an important yet controversial figure: Michael Aquino.
Michael Aquino and MindWars
Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Aquino.
Michael Aquino joined the U.S. Army in 1968 where he became an officer specializing in psychological warfare and, later, a Lieutenant colonel in military intelligence.
As Aquino climbed the ranks of the U.S. military, he also climbed the ranks of another organization: The Church of Satan.
“Michael Aquino began corresponding with Anton LaVey while a psychological operative for the U.S. Army, stationed in the jungles of Vietnam. Aquino returned to the States and was soon made a high-ranking priest and editor of the church’s Cloven Hoof newsletter. His distinctive appearance — he sported a prominent widow’s peak and darkly accented eyebrows — was further enhanced by a small 666 tattooed on his scalp.”
– Washington Post, A Devil of a Time
Aquino doing satanic things.
As years passed, the relationship between Aquino and LaVey deteriorated. The main reason: LaVey believed that Satan was a symbolic force while Aquino believed in the literal existence of Satan. In 1975, Aquino founded the Temple of Set – an occult order that revolved around an Egyptian deity on whom the Hebraic Satan was supposedly based.
Aquino’s occult activities did not interfere with his military career. In fact, he described politics and propaganda as forms of “lesser black magic”.
Aquino divided black magic into two forms: lesser black magic and greater black magic. He stated that lesser black magic entails “impelling” things that exist in the “objective universe” into doing a desired act by using “obscure physical or behavioral laws” and into this category he placed stage magic, psychodramas, politics, and propaganda.
– Jesper Aagaard, “The Seeds of Satan: Conceptions of Magic in Contemporary Satanism”
In 1980, as a “PSYOP Research & Analysis Team Leader”, Aquino c0-authored MindWar – an internal U.S. Army paper about the future of psychological operations. While this document was only intended for the eyes of government policymakers, it accidentally became public. And it caused quite a stir.
“Is the government involved in invasion of the mind beyond the blundering, haphazard legacy of the infamous MKULTRA experiments? Even more unsettling, do such efforts extend beyond conventional scientific research to dark and arcane arts whose very existence is the stuff of legend?”
– MindWar book description
The least one can say is that MindWar was visionary. It accurately predicted the 4th generation of warfare which focuses on bypassing armies in order to “attack population, culture, and institutions”. And the best way to accomplish this was, of course, through mass media.
“In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies and neutrals alike across the globe – neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics – but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.
These media are, of course, the electronic media – television and radio. State of the art developments in satellite communication, video recording techniques, and laser and optical transmission of broadcasts make possible a penetration of the minds of the world such as would have been inconceivable just a few years ago.”
– Michael A. Aquino and Paul E. Valley, “MindWar”
The ultimate goal of MindWar is to make people willingly do what they’re supposed to do, while not realizing they’ve been pushed towards that decision at every step of the way.
“For the mind to believe in its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion. Coercive measures used by the operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means. There is no need to resort to mind-weakening drugs such as those explored by the CIA; in fact the exposure of a single such method would do unacceptable damage to MindWar’s reputation for truth.”
– Ibid.
Towards the end of this short document, Aquino goes way beyond mass media. He states that PSYOPS must make full use of phenomenons such as electromagnetic fields and Extremely Low-Frequency Waves (ELFs) to make people more suggestible to MindWar.
“There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric activity, air ionization and extremely low frequency waves.”
ELF waves up to 100Hz are naturally occurring, but they can be produced artificially (such as for the Navy’s Project Sanguine for submarine communication). ELF-waves are not normally noticed by the unaided senses, yet their resonant effect upon the human body has been connected to both physiological disorders and emotional distortion. Infrasound vibration (up to 20 Hz) can subliminally influence brain activity to align itself to delta, theta, alpha or beta wave patterns, inclining an audience toward everything from alterness to passivity. Infrasound could be used tactically, as ELF-waves endure for great distances; and it could be used in conjunction with media broadcasts as well.”
– Ibid.
You’ve read correctly: Aquino stated that ELFs can be used in conjunction with media broadcasts.
My article 2018 “Government Files About Remote Mind Control” reviews leaked official documents about altering brain waves.
With all of that being said, let’s take another look at this PSYOP recruitment video.
Ghosts in the Machine
The recruitment video by the 4th PSYOP Group revolves around the saying “All the world’s a stage” – a quote from William Shakepesear which compares the world to a play and people to actors. However, in the context of PYSOP, this quote takes on a deeper meaning: Many of the events we see around the world are staged and choreographed by unseen puppet masters.
Appropriately enough, the video begins with the words:
“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?”
A puppet-master pulling the strings.
This creepy figure appears throughout the video without revealing himself. However, his silhouette looks familiar.
Left: Creepy figure. Right: Aquino.
The video subtly hints at the various “battlefields” of PYSOP using clever shots.
“Warfare is evolving and all the world’s a stage”. In the background, we see images of people filming propaganda and a person playing the piano. Because the music industry is involved in psychological warfare.
The video features multiple scenes of people scrolling their phones because Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, Reddit, and others are MindWar battlefields.
An old-timey cartoon shows a bumbling clown being revealed as a ghost (aka a spook).
The message of this highly symbolic image: Your ridiculous entertainers are actually agents of propaganda.
A clown-like entertainer (similar to one seen in the cartoon) gets ready to perform as the words “we come in many forms” are displayed.
A shot of an empty movie theatre indicates that the entertainment industry is fully involved in psychological warfare against citizens.
Throughout the video, we see images of protests and political movements.
The message of these scenes: These events did not happen organically, they were the result of psychological warfare. As Aquino wrote:
“For the mind to believe in its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion.”